Gehola
by ProcrastinatingPalindrome
Summary: Seven year old Eren is bored stiff on a rainy day until he meets a very weird boy at the library.


Forcing your son to go to the library on a perfectly good rainy day was, to Eren's mind in all his vast seven year old wisdom, downright cruel. There were puddles that needed to be jumped in, mud that needed to be thrown at those stupid boys down the street who picked on everyone smaller than them! Eren was _busy_, and being confined indoors was just unfair.

He had tried sulking and moping and complaining loudly the entire way to the library in protest, but his mother only shooed him over to the children's section and promised him a spanking later if he acted up before leaving in search of a novel. The children's section was just as boring as the grown up parts. Someone had hung up brightly colored pictures over the bookshelves in an attempt to liven things up, but it was still a _library_. It smelled musty and it was too quiet and there was _nothing to do_. Well, aside from reading, of course, but reading involved sitting still and being quiet, two of Eren's least favorite things.

Eren threw himself into one of the worn armchairs with a pout (purely for his own benefit, as there was no one around to see) and began scanning his surrounding in search of anything that could potentially be interesting. It might be fun to climb up the bookshelves, but his mom would definitely consider that 'acting up.' She always had a way of finding out when he pulled stunts like that, and he wasn't really in the mood for a spanking, thankyouverymuch.

What else? Maybe he could stack the books up like building blocks? Or maybe-

Eren suddenly noticed that he wasn't alone. There was a kid sitting at the table by the window, surrounded by a small pile of books. The kid's face was hidden behind a large book, but Eren could make out the top of a blond head over the book, and short legs dangling off the edge of the chair.

Anyone who liked books that much was clearly not normal, and so Eren ignored the kid and continued his search for something not-boring. Five minutes later he still had no luck, and glanced back at the figure at the table. Now there was a pair of eyes peeking over the top of the book at him, but the kid immediately ducked back down when he saw Eren looking.

Eren was already in an utterly foul mood, and being spied on by some weirdo kid only made his anger bubble over. He climbed out of his chair, marched over to the spy and slammed both hands down on the table. "Hey!" he snapped at the cover of the book. The book shook just a little, and then slowly, very slowly, lowered to reveal the face of a nervous looking boy.

Eren had fully planned to yell, 'what are you looking at?!' or something along those lines, but he already felt his temper simmering down against those fearful blue eyes. The boy looked like a spooked rabbit, and suddenly Eren felt like a great big bully.

"Wh-what are you…" Eren stopped. The boy had cringed the moment Eren opened his mouth, almost as if he was expecting to be hit. "What…are you reading?" he said awkwardly.

The boy blinked a few times in confusion, looked down at his book, looked up at Eren, back at the book, and finally mumbled something too quiet for Eren to make out.

"Speak up!" Eren said, trying his best to not sound mean. "I can't hear you!"

The boy bit his lip and finally spoke, just barely loud enough to be heard. "I-it's called _The Three Knights_. It's an adventure story."

"Oh. Um. Is it…any good?"

"Y-yeah!" The boy nodded enthusiastically, brightening up just a tiny bit. "It's my favorite. Um…d-do you like books too?"

"Nuh uh. I hate reading." The boy's face fell at that. "B-but I like adventure stories!" Eren added hastily. "So…tell me what your book's about!"

The boy smiled shyly and opened the book flat on the table. He was missing a front tooth, Eren noticed. "It's about these three knights," he said, pointing to the brightly colored pictures, "and they're all friends, and they go on adventures together 'cause the king wants them to explore the world and find all kinds of cool stuff!" He flipped a few pages ahead. "And they see all these weird animals! Look!" He pointed to a picture of the knights standing in the snow next to a strange looking bird. "This one's called a p…pen…p-e-n-g-u-i-n, penguin. And it's a bird, but it can't fly! It swims!"

Eren squinted at the picture. "That can't be a bird, then. It's not a bird if it doesn't fly."

"No, it _is_! It lays eggs and…and all the other stuff birds do. And look at this!" More pages flew by until they came to a picture of a huge grey animal. "This one's called an…el-e-phant. They can pick up things with their noses!"

Eren went cross-eyed to look at his own nose. He was pretty sure his nose couldn't do anything aside from smelling stuff. "That," he said with absolute certainty, "is _weird_."

The boy muffled a giggle behind his hands. "They don't have little noses like us! Theirs are really long, so they can wrap it around stuff to grab it." He pointed to a picture of the elephant lifting one of the knights into the air.

They spent the next half an hour flipping through the book, looking at pictures of big lizards and animals with long necks and fish that could fly. "I wish animals like that were real," Eren murmured after a while. "Think how cool it would be if there were elepants running around!"

"Elephants," the boy corrected quietly. He suddenly looked very serious. "Can I tell you a secret?" he whispered. "You have to promise not to tell."

"Promise!" Eren swore solemnly.

The boy glanced around nervously, and then leaned close to Eren's ear. "I think they're real animals. I think we've just never seen them because they live outside the walls."

"But how do you know? They're just pictures in a book!"

"Yeah, but how could anyone make them all up? Some of them have to be real! I bet someone wrote this book before the Titans came, and they were just writing about all the neat animals in the world!"

The boy's face was nearly glowing in excitement, all his old fear forgotten. "I wanna know all about the outside world, but I get in trouble whenever I ask. So I'm trying to find a book about it. That's part of the secret, because the librarian gets really mad whenever I tell him what I'm looking for."

Now this was surprising. The librarian really was a scary old man; even Eren didn't like to talk to him when he could avoid it. He had assumed the boy would cry or pee his pants if he was ever on the receiving end of the librarian's fury, but he didn't seem daunted in the least, not when a book about the outside world was on the line.

"I looked through all the kid's books in the library," the boy continued, speaking faster and faster as he got more excited, "but I couldn't find anything here. I bet if there's a book about what's outside around here, it's in the grownup section. So I'm gonna get better at reading as fast as I can, so I can read those too!"

"But why do you wanna know what's outside so bad?"

"Don't you want to know? There could be all kinds of amazing things out there! Things we can't even imagine!"

The boy's cheeks had turned pink in his enthusiasm, and he was nearly bouncing in his chair as he talked. There was something so captivating, so thrilling in it all, that Eren just blurted out, "So why don't we go outside to see for ourselves?"

And just like that, the boy froze. "We can't do that," he said, and his voice had dropped back down into his old scared rabbit tone.

"And why not?" Eren said stoutly, grabbing one of the boy's hands. "You wanna know all about the outside world, right? Don't you wanna see the elepants?"

"But the Titans…" the boy mumbled, too shocked by what Eren was suggesting to even correct him.

"We'll just run away from 'em! They can't climb, right? So we'll just…run really fast to get away from them once we get outside, and then climb up a tree and wait until they get bored and leave!" This was a genius plan. Eren wondered if the Recon Corp had ever thought of that. Maybe he should tell them.

"But I can't climb trees," the boy protested, but Eren could see that glimmer of excitement creeping back into his eyes.

"I'll teach you how!" Eren promised, squeezing his hand. "We can't leave right now, anyway. We gotta train to be adventurers first. And you gotta find your book so we know what to look for once we get outside."

The boy blinked twice at all that. And then his face split into a wide smile, revealing the gap in his teeth again. "My name's Armin Arlert. We can't be adventurers together if we don't know names, right?"

Eren grinned broadly right back. "Right! And I'm Eren Jaeger! So Armin, where do you want to look for your book next?"


End file.
